piece from #Bottomless

"Sing! Sing!" the passing Germans shout sun-drunkly.
It's a sunny day. Averche smiles at me, I sit so that he can see me with his side vision.
"What are they shouting?" Asen asks.
"Sing," I translate.
He shakes his head. He plays very well, but no one notices, as I said, usually, because people only see Mariyan, come up to shake Mariyan's hand, thank Mariyan, ask Mariyan questions. They want to touch the beauty. And Mariyan accustomed. Accustomed to the admiration that everyone needs. So much so that he stopped appreciating it.

I was surprised at first, because where he and I come from, we are taught the laws of life, we are taught to be grateful, we are taught not to push away an outstretched hand and to give it to the one who has fallen, we are taught to appreciate the attention given to us, and even more so, admiration. And so I looked at the way Mariyan behaves with people and thought - why are you so queen, my boy! I wondered for a long time. And then I realized, after Munich, already. All my life I have been yelling at every corner with a stream of admiration that he is the most beautiful. And all the garbage stuck, wanting to suck on the stream itself. Like, if they're near, maybe they'll get part of admiration addressed to him, or maybe it'll just taste good. Because for all eternity my averche was not needed by anyone but me. And suddenly all need him, furore tsatsa[7]. Although, of course, as a person, with all the flaws, doubts, fears and failures, he is still only needed by me. Pay attention, if someone suddenly begins to be liked by everyone, it means he has someone who needs him sincerely, and everyone else already likes someone's love for him itself. Because we love admiration so much and want to relate to it in any way we can.
"Sing something," I say, still smiling.

He nods and starts "Bella ciao[2]" for some reason. I marvel, I didn't realize the guys knew that song. I nod approvingly and smile. Well of course, as you would expect, Averche doesn't know the lyrics. He only sings the chorus, but they know how to play the melody, and the Germans gather, start singing along, someone knows the lyrics, the crowd sings along, someone dances. Seeing the anti-fascist joy in the center of Munich, couples dancing in front of the Feldherrnhalle[3], is very gratifying. Remembering the terrible and precise words of Ilya Ehrenburg[4], it is always a joy to see the celebration of life.
There is a song by Yaroslav Yevdokimov, "May Waltz," a dizzying royal voice, words by Mikhail Yasen. The author of the words was there, in Vienna in the forty-fifth year, so when you listen to the song, you can perfectly imagine how it was. And now, in Munich, to "Goodbye, Beautiful", I saw May of the forty-fifth for real.

Of course, we can hold any mood we want, I and he. Sometimes we schlep the hell out of that game at the Elephant[5] Café, stealing moments of our joy from the physical universe. Mariyan looks at me, smiles, stops repeating "Bella ciao" and spills out the anti-fascist, only Bulgarian, song "Nikola"[6]. The Germans, as if realizing that the idea of the song is the same, they smile and continue dancing. Someone wipes their tears. After the song, everyone claps. Someone comes up to him, says something, he answers in English. Someone switches to English. Someone comes to me, I smile, explain and answer in German. The Germans are joyful, they ask me questions. We laugh. Mariyan, periodically, warily and angrily looks in my direction.

A German woman comes up and starts speaking in Russian. She has a nice accent, it's obvious that she hasn't spoken it for a long time, but she speaks well. Mariyan also switches to Russian. He wonders how she knows the language so well. She's from East Germany. She was an intern in Moscow, studied Russian at the University. She has been living in Munich for many years now, and has a rich husband. She tells us with longing how good it was in East Germany, there was sense, she says, there was friendship, there was hope that there would be no hostility.
"But now everything is fake and there's nothing to live for," she waves her hand. "But let's live, maybe we'll live to time, eh?"
"Of course we will. Eternity is long," I say in German.

She laughs, shakes my hand, buys a disk.
We do not have such a culture, for a hundred years of human life, the desire to humiliate another has been etched out of people who stand farthest from the monkey. In the young USSR there were signs: "don't insult a catering worker with a tip". I'm ashamed to tip street musicians. I'm ashamed to tip waiters. I get, I get everything, that the shame should not be on me and not on the person I am tipping, the shame should be on the governments under which people are forced to rely on handouts. I get really well that under capitalism it is considered normal to humiliate a person with a handouts. I have watched in horror as people teach their children, barely able to walk, to handout. I'm not ashamed of myself, of course, I'm ashamed to humiliate a human being. I wouldn't want to get a handout for my labor. I would like to get payment for it. So, of course, I didn't handout Mariyan. I called him back into my life and told him he could use everything I had.

As she walks away, Mariyan looks at me in amazement.
"What kind of people... where do people like this come from? I mean, these are different people, completely different. It's like they're made differently."
"It's the red gene," I say. "Such people are the furthest along in evolutionary development from apes to human."
"Why are they like that? How did they get like that here?" Mariyan continued to smile with familiar admiration. It is our joyful surprise when we meet a human being with a spark of Human.

That's where our moment ends. His eyes are fading. "Don't go away..." - I turn away so he won't hear. Because otherwise he couldn't leave.
On the collage is the Feldhernhalle itself, and the place nearby where we played)) and the singer himself))))

[2]An Italian folk song of members of the Resistance movement in the Modena Mountains during World War II, which gained worldwide fame in the late 1940s.
[3]Hall of Bavarian warlords. The Feldherrnhalle carried considerable meaning under National Socialism.
[4]But among the fifty million victims of the Second World War there is not one: fascism. He survived May 1945, he ached, he moped, but he survived.
During the war years, I repeated day after day: we must come to Germany to destroy fascism. I was afraid that all the sacrifices, the exploits of the Soviet people, the bravery of the partisans of Poland, Yugoslavia, France, the grief and pride of London, the furnaces of Auschwitz, the rivers of blood - all this could remain the Bengal fire of victory, an episode of history, if low, impure politics prevailed again.
I wrote in 1944: "The French writer Georges Bernanos, a militant Catholic, rejecting with indignation the attempts of some democrats to stand up for fascism, wrote in "La Marseillaise": "Before the war, a large part of public opinion in England, in America, in France justified, supported, praised fascism. I repeat - not only allowed fascism, but promoted it in the hope, I say foolishly, of controlling this plague, of using it against its rivals and competitors... Munich was not mere foolishness. Munich was the dastardly denouement of a speculative scheme..." Unfortunately, there are still people who want to keep the contagion "in reserve", only diluting the broth in which the plague bacteria breed... We must remember: fascism was born from the greed and stupidity of some, from the cunning and cowardice of others. If humanity wants to end the bloody nightmare of these years, it must end fascism. If fascism is left somewhere to be divorced, rivers of blood will flow again in ten or twenty years... Fascism is a terrible cancerous tumor, it cannot be treated with mineral water, it must be removed. I do not believe in the good heart of people who cry over the executioners, these supposed do-gooders are preparing the death of millions of innocents."
Ilya Ehrenburg.
"People, Years, Life."
[5]A touching love scene from the movie 17 Moments of Spring, when the Soviet spy, undercover - Stirlitz meets his wife, they are not allowed to approach each other, cannot talk, can only look at each other. They haven't seen each other in a very long time.
[6]Nikola Kostadinov Parapunov was a member of the Bulgarian Communist Party, a partisan commander, and a figure in the anti-fascist movement.
[7] Russian slang, it means arrogant person, who express their arrogance brightly.

#Bottomless can be read here: https://albireo-mkg.com/product/bottomless
It's in Russian, but in English coming soon